


we're lonely (it's our only state of being)

by TolkienGirl



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Narnia, Yearning, november - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 07:34:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16656907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Winter is precious as a beginning, summer as an end. Autumn is something more painful, Lucy thinks, greeting November with a sigh.





	we're lonely (it's our only state of being)

This, Lucy thinks, is hardly a country home. The lawn is a pocket handkerchief square, with one lofty maple. Lucy loves the maple so much her heart aches for it, as her heart aches for so many things. When she and Edmund rake the leaves beneath it, she reminds herself that it will do nobody any good if she names the tree, or asks it for its secrets.

This is England, not Narnia.

She needs no reminder of _that_.

“Do you think we could have done it?”

“Done what?” And Edmund leans against his rake, hands clasped over each other. This is his last year at home. The next will take him to university, leaving Lucy all alone.

“Stayed.” The tip of her nose is prickling with the chilly air; it is November. The maple leaves have been ungracious in falling—some still cling stubbornly to the inner boughs. “Stayed _there_ , I mean.”

“You mean,” Edmund asks carefully, “If we had followed Caspian? If we just hadn’t come back?”

“Yes.”

“And never seen the rest of them again?”

Of course Edmund thinks of their family. Edmund has the kind of heart that could be twisted in the first place; when he got himself to rights again, he became far kinder, in some moments, than Lucy could ever be.

Lucy runs towards the light between trees, and the sound of the sea, and the wind in the grass—even if that means running away from everything else.

“You’re right,” she says humbly. “We couldn’t have.”

 

When winter turns to spring and the world stays gray, she counts the traces of blue in the sky and tells herself that they are best and truest when added together.

 

“Another letter from your sister, at last!” Mum exclaims. “But it’s so short—”

“It’s efficient,” Lucy interrupts. It’s the cruelest defense of Susan she knows.

 

“Will you ever think me silly, Ed?” She is sketching. It is summer, summer come again. They are at the seashore, because the war is two years gone. Peter and Susan are here too, but only Edmund and Lucy have chosen to sit among the grass-clad dunes that edge the shore.

Edmund reaches over and clasps her hand. A quick, light touch—the sort of thing that was better known to them in the days of silk and ermine, than in cold English air.

“Only if I think it of myself.”

 

Winter is precious as a beginning, summer as an end. Autumn is something more painful, Lucy thinks, greeting November with a sigh.

It feels old, as she never wishes to feel. Its dreams and hopes seem tired.

 

“After a while,” Professor Kirke says, wistfully, “The dreams fade. These days I’m lucky for a sniff of Narnian air, or a note of Narnian music, waking or sleeping.”

Lucy feels all the weight of it—the weight of decades, of forgetting, and thinks, _I am not brave enough, Aslan. Not brave enough to forget._

In the end, she doesn’t have to.

 

 


End file.
